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Adult Education Open Community of Resources

This group provides an opportunity for adult educators and learners to organize materials dedicated to supporting Adult Basic Education (ABE) and Adult English as a Second Language (Adult ESL) teaching and learning. Adult educators and learners are encouraged to join this open community to share high-quality, high-interest materials for adult learners with low literacy levels preparing for the GED, new career opportunities, increased participation in their children’s education, English language learning, and other important skills. We strongly encourage you to tag each resource you use and evaluate as “Adult Basic Education” or “Adult ESL” so others will also be able to find these adult learner-appropriate material.

Working with refugees?

Does anyone in this group have experience working with refugees? I am a volunteer teacher in a refugee camp in Sofia, Bulgaria and I just created a group called "Refugee Education" to help create a community of volunteer teachers like myself. I've already added a few of your resources to our group because we offer English classes for the adults as well as for the children.

If the refugees learning English that you work with are high beginners or at higher levels -- and if they have access to the Internet by computer or portable digital devices such as tablets or smartphones -- USALearns may be a useful (free) online curriculum.

You could also post your question to the adult English language Learning -- or other communities of practice on LINCS. To register, go to http://www.lincs.ed.gov. These groups are usually quite active and responsonsive to questions like yours. Also, on LINCS you will find the (free) English Pro Professional development modules that might be of interest to your volunteer teachers group.

On my Media Library of Teaching Skills (MLoTS) website, http://www.mlots.org you will find many links to free, usually short, ESL/ESOL professional development videos. Some of these my colleague and I made, but there are many more, including videos for volunteers, in this section. You will also find lots of free ESL/ESOL websites in The Literacy List on this page.

Thanks David! These videos that are intended to support volunteer teachers are great and exactly what I'm thinking of for our growing group of volunteer teachers in Europe. The reality we see in Greece and Bulgaria at the moment is that the children and adults waiting in the camps for asylum, etc are not enrolled in school and rely on the volunteers that are teaching them in non-formal settings. The majority of these teachers are not properly trained and have very little experience (myself included) this is why I've set up a group and I'm tesitng out an idea of creating an online platform to help these organizations that are delivering non-formal education to refugees to access, share and co-create to good quality material to improve the quality of the learning opportunities offered to this population of displced learners. Would you have time for a quick chat? you can send me an email at katie@teamup2teach.org to set up a time. I'm in Sofia, Bulgaria time zone. Thanks!

I think you'll find there are a fair number of adult educators in this group who work with refugees. Certainly here in Minnesota many of our adult learners are refugees, coming from places like the Horn of Africa and southeast Asia.

Is there a specific type of resource you're looking for?

If you find any resources you think would be beneficial for adult learners, please share them in the folders in this group as well.

Thanks for your response, Susan. I'm testing this platform as a place to create a community for volunteer teachers providing non-formal education to refugees across the globe - especially those that are currently waiting in camps and centers. Now, most of us are sharing and communicating via social media and google docs. So, I'm curious about other collaboration platforms out there where this group can support each other and draw in advice, coaching, mentoring and content from the wider professional community of teachers and experts in refugee trauma and protection. I'm familiar with INEE (Inter-agency Network for Emergency Education) and they are the closest to this as a platform, but they fall a bit short in terms of getting good lesson plan content out into the field. I am looking to speak to them as well and learn about their next steps because they are very involved in emergency education response.